CMS! Episode 6: Choosing Your Tone of Voice in Content Marketing

The tone of voice you choose in your blog posts, sales pages, or promotional reports can damage results if it doesn’t suit the style of your reader. Watch this week’s episode of Content Marketing… Stripped! to find out more.

How do you talk to customers face-to-face?

It’s easy to forget when you’re writing, that content marketing is a conversation with your customer. When working with clients who are struggling to find the right tone of voice I ask them to describe how they would talk to that customer face to face.

Well, they’re young students, and their English isn’t great so I have to make sure I speak clearly and simply.

Our engineer customers are pretty straight-forward. They want you to get to the point and talk to them clearly and directly. They like to know within seconds that the software can do what they need it to do.

My coaching clients are often quite unsure, even nervous so I have to be gentle, soothing and give them lots of reassurances that trying out coaching with me will be fun.

Why business marketing struggles with tone-of-voice

What makes writing so difficult is:

Your customer isn’t in front of you

Your writing skills were developed at school and work

When you write your content marketing materials it’s just you, your head and a keyboard or pen. Your customer isn’t with you actively responding to your words as they would be if they were sitting opposite you having a chat.

What’s more, most of us learned our writing in school or at work and so we’re used to being rewarded for content that looks like an essay or a formal report.

As a result many business owners find it difficult to shake their previous ‘corporate voice’ developed from writing internal memos. But as we’ve already mentioned, your marketing is not a memo, it’s a conversation.

And unless you can mimic the style of conversation you would have in person with your customer, your blogs and content marketing pieces will miss the mark.

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About Amy Harrison

I am a copywriter, content-trainer, speaker and filmmaker teaching businesses how to avoid drab business content and write copy customers love to read. You can also find me hanging out and sharing content over on Google+.